Cons
Only slightly faster than Nvidia GTX 780 Ti for significantly more money. Most consumers don't need 6GB of RAM.

Bottom Line

The EVGA Titan Black's features are aimed specifically at hardcore gamers and those who deal in high-performance computing applicationsbut within that small slice of the market, this is an excellent high-end graphics card.

The EVGA GTX Titan Black high-end graphics card ($1,019) is currently the highest-performing single GPU you can buy, particularly for certain scientific and high-performance computing (HPC) applications, and the price tag puts it out of contention for most gamers. There are a handful of people who will benefit from Nvidia's powerhouse, but the majority of high-end PC gamers will want to stick with the Editors' Choice Nvidia GeForce GTX 780.

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The GTX Titan Black is the follow-up to last year's Nvidia GeForce GTX Titan. Like the Nvidia Titan, the Titan Black is based on the GK110 GPU, but it brings more cores to the table—2,880, up from the 2,668 cores that were enabled on the original Titan card. This puts it on even ground with the consumer-focused Nvidia GTX 780 Ti, but the Titan Black has 6GB of RAM, up from 3GB on all Nvidia GTX 780 and GTX 780 Ti cards.

Like the original GTX Titan, the Titan Black retains certain high-end computing (HPC) features that Nvidia typically ropes off from consumer-oriented cards. First, the GPU is capable of up to 1.8 teraflops per second of double-precision floating-point calculations, compared with the Nvidia GTX 780 Ti's anemic 223 gigaflops per second. It also supports features like Hyper-Q and Dynamic Parallelism—capabilities that are often useful to developers and scientific compute workloads, but see essentially no use in consumer-focused markets. According to Nvidia, Hyper-Q technology helps increase performance for thousands of legacy MPI applications without needing a major rewrite of code, while Dynamic Parallelism is the ability to launch new grids from the GPU dynamically, simultaneously, and independently of the CPU.

When Nvidia launched the original Titan, it positioned the card as the no-holds-barred best option for both gamers and HPC users. Over the past year, we've seen that dual-purpose position erode, thanks to the Nvidia GTX 780 and Nvidia GeForce GTX 780 Ti, both of which offer much of Titan's performance, but at a markedly lower price. AMD has mounted a stiff challenge of its own with the Radeon R9 290 family, and these moves have left the Titan Black in a precarious position. With the Nvidia GTX 780 Ti selling for as little as $689, is the Titan Black worth an extra $330?

Performance The answer is complicated. First, let's look at general performance. We've had to split our comparison cards between 1080p (where we still have figures on the Nvidia GTX 780 Ti) and 4K, where the Nvidia GTX 780 Ti wasn't available for retesting. (Note: We didn't have Nvidia GTX 780 available for retesting at all). All benchmark tests were run using Windows 8.1, with all updates and patches installed. AMD's Catalyst Beta 14.4 and Nvidia's GeForce 337.50 beta drivers were both used for testing.

The first thing to note is that 4K clearly will remain the province of multi-GPU configurations a while longer. While the Titan Black is unquestionably the fastest single-GPU we tested in 4K, it's not capable of maintaining a playable frame rate at this resolution, with all detail levels maxed out. In three of our four tests run in 4K, the EVGA Titan Black is stuck well below the 30 frames per second (fps) limit—and that's as low as a modern title can realistically run and still be considered smooth. BioShock Infinite was the only exception, where the Titan Black's performance offered 40fps. In 1080p, the GTX Titan Black was moderately faster than the Nvidia GTX 780 Ti, with small wins in Total War: Shogun 2 and a 5-percent lead in BioShock Infinite. The AMD Radeon R9 295X2 was far faster than a single Titan Black, but of course it would be, since it's a dual-GPU card with a 500W TDP.

Does 6GB of RAM (like you see with the Titan Black) help in modern games? For the most part, it does not—at least not yet. If you're planning on buying a single card, the Nvidia GTX 780 Ti or AMD Radeon R9 290X are capable of taking care of your needs for less than $1,000. Both of these cards turned in excellent 1080p results well above the 30fps mark in all of our titles. There's always the question of whether more RAM will be helpful at some point in the future when 4K gaming is more common, but in this case, we can apply a bit of logic to the question. The Nvidia GTX 780 Ti wasn't fast enough to drive 4K games on its own at the highest detail levels, where the RAM would make the most difference. Keep in mind, however, that 4K gaming is in its infancy. By the time 4K monitors and titles are widespread, there are going to be different GPUs with more memory available.

If you plan to deploy two GPUs, the situation potentially changes. A pair of Titan Blacks can drive 4K, which means you might be reasonably using the configuration long enough as a top-end solution to make the extra RAM more relevant. The complicating factor is there AMD Radeon R9 295X2 which, at $1,500 for a dual GPU, is still substantially cheaper than the $2,000+ price tag on a brace of two Titan Blacks in SLI configuration.

Then again, it's an open question whether buyers at this price point even care much about concepts like "best bang for your buck." If you're dropping $1,500 to $2,000 on just the graphics cards for your gaming rig, you probably can afford to splurge. Still, the gap between the AMD R9 295X2 and two EVGA GTX Titan Black cards in SLI is going to be much smaller than the 33-percent difference in price.

The best-use case for the Nvidia GeForce GTX Titan Black, therefore, is the same as it has been since the Nvidia GeForce GTX Titan launched. This is a card for people who have a mixture of scientific computing workloads and heavy gaming, who want a card that can excel in both, and who plan to use CUDA in a programming environment alongside its gaming applications. Oh, and are willing to swing more than a grand for a single GPU. The majority of high-end gaming PC owners are better off with the Nvidia GeForce GTX 780 TI or the Nvidia GeForce GTX 780, our Editors' Choice for high-end graphics cards.

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